Do you need a financial projections slide at seed?
Not always. In the same Fenwick piece, Heddleston notes that only 58 percent of founders who successfully raised a seed round included financial slides in their deck. Fenwick partner Sam Angus adds that "most investors will not put much credence in projections for early-stage companies" and that operating metrics often matter more.
That matches the older DocSend study reported by TechCrunch, which looked at more than 200 decks and found the financials among the pages investors spent the most time on, alongside team and competition. High attention cuts both ways. If your numbers are thin, a big projections chart pulls the reader's eye straight to the weakest part of the story.
My rule: if you have little or no revenue, keep the model ready, put a one-page summary in your pitch deck appendix, and spend the main-deck slot on traction. Once you have paying customers and a repeatable way to get more, the slide earns its place. Waveup, a fundraising consultancy, takes a similar line and argues most pre-seed and seed decks are better off without it.
What a financial projections slide should show
A financial projections slide should show yearly revenue, gross margin, operating costs or burn, and the cash position over three years, with actuals clearly separated from forecast. Add the one or two business drivers behind the revenue line, such as customer count, and mark where the new round lands.
Keep the time unit coarse. SlideModel's guide says each column should be a full year and advises: "Avoid monthly or quarterly breakdowns unless specifically requested." I agree. Monthly detail belongs in the spreadsheet you send when someone asks for the model.
- Revenue by year, with last year's actual figure as the first bar
- Gross margin as a percentage, because it tells investors what kind of business this is
- Net burn or operating expenses, so the reader can see what growth costs
- Year-end cash, or the month cash runs low, which is the number that links to your raise
How many years should the projections cover?
Three years on the slide. Build further out in the model if you like. Waveup's advice is "Build 5 years (some VCs require it), but speak to 3 years in the room" (source), and SlideModel calls three years "standard for early-stage startups."
Years four and five are mostly a growth-rate assumption extended forward. Putting them on the slide adds height to the chart without adding information, and it's the first place a sceptical partner will push.
Tie the projections to the raise
This is the part most templates skip. Olena Petrosyuk, a partner at Waveup, is quoted in their guide saying: "The story needs to match. If you're raising $10M, you need a $10M gap in the model."
In practice that means the cash line on this slide should dip to its low point around the time the new money runs out, and the runway you state should be the same number of months as on your use of funds slide. When I'm designing a deck, I check those two slides against each other before anything else. A mismatch tells an investor nobody reconciled the deck with the model, which is a worse signal than an aggressive forecast.
How I design a financial projections slide
The design goal is simple: a reader should know within a few seconds which numbers happened and which are planned, and what the headline claim is. Everything else is detail they can ask for.
- Separate actuals from forecast visually. Solid fill for actual years, a lighter tint or outline for projected years, and a thin divider labelled "Forecast".
- Use one chart. Revenue as bars, with burn or cash as a single line on the same years, or a small four-row table underneath. Not three charts competing for attention.
- Label values directly on the bars and drop the gridlines. Nobody should have to trace a bar to a y-axis on a phone screen.
- Round the numbers. Write $4.2M, not $4,213,870. False precision makes a guess look like an accounting statement.
- State the currency and year labels once, in the subtitle (for example "USD, fiscal years"), rather than on every figure.
- Footnote the two or three assumptions that drive the curve, such as new customers per month and average contract value. You'll be asked about them anyway.
- Write the slide title as the claim, for example "Break-even in year three without another raise", rather than "Financials".
Mistakes I fix most often on this slide
The most common one is a pasted Excel P&L: twenty rows, five columns, 9-point type. It looks thorough and gets read by nobody. Pick the four lines above and move the full statement to the appendix.
Next is mixing projections into the traction chart, so actual growth and hoped-for growth share one line. Keep history on the traction slide and the forecast here. I covered why in the traction slide guide.
Then there's the unexplained hockey stick. Steep growth is fine if a driver on the slide explains it, such as a sales hire plan or a new channel. Without one, the chart reads as a wish.
Last, numbers that don't match other slides. Revenue on the business model slide, runway on the use of funds slide and cash here should all come from the same version of the model. Lock the model before the design pass, not after.
Where the slide goes in the deck
Near the end: after the business model and competition, just before the ask. By then the reader understands how you make money, so the projections read as a consequence of the model rather than a claim on their own. Full statements, scenarios and unit economics go in the appendix.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on the slide, or the whole deck rebuilt around a model that already works, here's how I work and what it costs.